Stephen’s Blog

For whatever reason you find yourself needing to create a pdf. Amazingly enough this happens once every couple of months and you don’t want to spend $88.95 plus S&H on Adobe Acrobat Standard just to scratch this small itch. Well never fear, someone has already scratched for you. For the price of a 13mb download you can be creating PDF’s left and right with PDFCreator. This open source program creates a virtual printer that you can use with just about any windows program to create pdf files. The downloads can be found here.

I have a confession to make. I have been a user of open source softare for about four years now and I have never submitted a bug or otherwise made a contribution. I took a baby step this evening and submitted a bug for wordpress, the blogging software used on amberandstephen.com.

It wasn’t earth-shattering. Just something that could annoy users. Back to my point.

Looking through the code it is amazing to see the amount of time and effort that goes into to software development. Everyone who uses open source software should at the very least say thank you to the developers and contributers. And if the opportunity presents itself find a way to contribute.

Of course this goes beyond just open source. I think we need a “Hug a Software Developer” day to go along with all the other days that seem to be taking over calendars. I want my hugs like everyone else.